Parental Units
By Lawrence Garcia
New York Film Festival 2025:
What Does That Nature Say to You
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, Cinema Guild
Having spent the better part of a decade paring down narratives to their essentials, working with increasingly minimal setups and decidedly spare scenarios, Hong Sang-soo has recently changed course. While keeping to similar production methods—in every film since Introduction (2021) he has served as writer, director, producer, DP, and composer—Hong has decided to reintroduce recognizable, even conventional dramatic stakes into his cinema. Last year’s By the Stream (2024), which follows a blacklisted actor who returns to his alma mater to direct a controversial skit, stood out from Hong’s recent period for its unusual plethora of incident. And with What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong offers yet another dramatically charged scenario, one that’s practically Aristotelian in its unity of action. A young man accompanies his girlfriend for a visit to her home to meet her family; at dinner, he gets extremely drunk and embarrasses himself; the next day, he leaves. It is a mark of Hong’s unassuming radicality, however, that what might otherwise be a straightforward scenario becomes a much stranger affair.
Take the opening scene, which cuts from a shot of a middle-aged woman in a kitchen to the interior of a sedan, where a couple sits and watches as another car pulls out onto the road. From snatches of conversation, we learn that the couple, thirtyish poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk) and his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi), have driven from Seoul to the latter’s childhood home. We learn that despite having been with Junhee for several years, Donghwa has neither visited nor met her parents, and that he has no present plans to do either. We also learn from Junhee that the car that just left, though its driver was unseen to us, was that of Junhee’s mother, Sunhee (Cho Yunhee). And although Donghwa only meets her much later, over an hour into the film, we surmise that the woman we saw cooking was Sunhee. The nondescript cut from kitchen to car interior thus gains formal and narrative motivation, linking the two images both spatially and dramatically. But it is characteristic of Hong’s approach that this relation is not given in advance and only becomes intelligible in retrospect. For a while, the opening image of a woman cooking just hangs there—a floating event that’s only later assimilated into a concrete progression.
If such effects are characteristic of Hong’s cinema, this is because of how he has, over the course of three decades and 33 features, gradually developed an approach that estranges us from our assumptions about conventional film grammar. Hong’s bifurcated breakout, Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), for instance, plays the encounter between a filmmaker and artist twice, each isolated iteration comprising some repetition of dialogue and setting. But accordingly, when Hong conspicuously repeats dialogue and staging across scenes in other films, as he does in The Day After (2017) and Walk Up (2022), we are not immediately inclined to read those scenes as chronologically following each other—that is, until conversational cues finally allow us to realize that what we are seeing is not overt structural play but simply the result of a character’s memory lapse or force of habit. His recent In Our Day (2023), to take another example, alternates between two stories whose relation to each other isn’t concretized: Despite a number of coincidences that appear in both stories, it never becomes clear whether the characters in each segment are related, whether the stories are unfolding at the same time, or even whether they occur in the same universe. But consequently, when we are confronted with that initial cut in What Does That Nature Say to You, we are not inclined to assume a fixed relation between the two spaces. That we are eventually able to confirm the spatiotemporal connections across these opening shots, about halfway through the film, does not diminish the fact that in Hong’s films, we are continually asked to consider—or to reconsider—the various assumptions that such basic chronological ordering presupposes. What his latest offers, then, is the prospect of seeing this dynamic in the context of an apparently unified dramatic scenario.
What Does That Nature Say to You is notable, then, not because it eschews dramatic material but because it withholds the usual means of discerning which details are relevant or irrelevant to the nominal drama. Thinking that no one is home, Junhee ventures to show Donghwa around the house, only for them to run into her father, Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo), who invites him to stay for dinner, thereby setting the film’s plot in motion. In the course of this somewhat awkward encounter, which unfolds in a single shot, Oryeong also expresses interest in Donghwa’s older car, a 1996 Kia Pride, and even asks if he can sit in it for a bit. After receiving permission, he then hops into the car alone and—still without a cut—quickly drives out of view, leaving Junhee and Donghwa somewhat bewildered, waiting in real time for him to return. It is a hilariously unexpected fillip to a familiar sort of interaction. But whereas another director might clearly underscore its plot function—perhaps to establish a character trait that will later become important, to highlight the narrative significance of the car, or even to indicate that it serves no larger purpose—Hong denies us any such cues.
It would be possible to see this scene, like others in What Does That Nature Say to You, as mere violations of narrative economy. Yet what Hong’s direction demonstrates is the contingency of making such judgments based on assumed criteria of what is and is not of importance. The result is a film dense with details that float free of their ostensible dramatic scaffolding. After Oryeong invites Donghwa to dinner, he insists the couple and Junhee’s sister, Neunghee (Park Miso), go for lunch and then visit a nearby Buddhist temple. Viewed in relation to the impending dinner, these passages, which play out at length, would seem to be mere digressions on the way to the climactic meal. But as with the opening shot of Junhee’s mother cooking, these scenes retain an independence that’s irreducible to their narrative function. A tense conversation between Donghwa and Neunghee at lunch takes no precedence over their leisurely jaunt through the Buddhist temple during which the former tries to write notes for a poem. Donghwa’s drunken tirade at dinner, during which he fails to recite a poem he has written, is undeniably of central significance. But even here, it is notable that the question of Donghwa’s suitability as Junhee’s partner does not receive markedly more emphasis than his poetic aspirations, and that what we are seeing is an artistic crisis as much as a relationship one. Due to his penchant for long takes and minimal camera setups, Hong’s dramatic emphases tend to be conveyed through duration rather than composition. With this in mind, we might notice that following the disastrous dinner, Donghwa’s nighttime stroll through the family’s garden property after he sobers up, takes up as much time as his hasty goodbye to Junhee before he leaves the next morning. By the film’s end, we might thus wonder whether it’s entirely accurate to describe the film as a meet-the-parents drama in relation to which Donghwa’s various nature walks would be merely reprieves, detours, and diversions.
In fact, these plein air peregrinations provide something of a clue to Hong’s enigmatic title. Such scenes are not new to his work: think of the mountain vistas of The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), Namhan Fortress in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013), Changgyeonggung Palace in Our Sunhi (2013)—really, any of the locations through which Hong has spun his seasonal variations. But in Hong’s earlier films, especially, these locations mainly serve as stable backdrops against which to view the changeable romances and fickle fortunes of his characters. In What Does That Nature Say to You, by contrast, we are not able to so easily separate foreground and background, to assume a naturalized landscape against which some human drama is meant to unfold. From this perspective, Hong’s title suggests that the artist’s principal imperative is to take nothing for granted, and to find new ways of making nature speak.